The exemplary embodiments described herein relate generally to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) additives and, more specifically, to EOR materials databases and listings of such materials based on specific oil reservoir conditions.
This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented, or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations and acronyms used in this document and/or the drawings are defined below, prior to the claims.
Primary and secondary oil recovery typically extracts no more than 10% to 40% of the original-oil-in-place (OOIP). Since most of the oil reservoirs are becoming older, tertiary methods called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) methods have started to be employed to extract the remaining oil from the reservoir. For instance, as of 2015, it has been reported that a total of 456 cases of successful EOR applications (where 437 were onshore and 19 were offshore) occurred.
There are a number of different techniques for EOR, including chemical, gas, and thermal EOR. Some techniques utilize methods and processes for successful EOR for onshore and offshore applications. Such EOR methods or processes could include polymer flooding, surfactant flooding, alkaline flooding, nanoparticle flooding, or a combination of these, such as ASP (alkaline, surfactant, and polymer flooding).
Such EOR methods or processes, however, are generally implemented without use of a chemical EOR materials database that associates (i) oil reservoir conditions; (ii) any chemical EOR cocktails used; and/or (iii) EOR effectiveness obtained. Furthermore, such methods or processes generally lack any method of recommendation of the chemical EOR cocktails for a specific oil reservoir condition. In particular, methods currently in use generally lack the displaying of materials and/or concentrations of the materials to an operator of the system.